While I was in flight over the Atlantic to come back to the old Europe, the awesome gnome release team finally put out GNOME 3. Not only that, www.gnome.org now sports a fresh new look, but most importantly some great new content.

I am of the opinion that the primary measure of success of an open source project is its ability to attract and keep contributors and I think in this regard GNOME 3 is already a success. The changes in the UI – even the controversial ones – managed to revitalize a project that was slowly falling in a drowsy routine, refocusing efforts of long-standing contributors and attracting new forces. At the same time the great efforts spent cleaning up the programming platform provide a future-proof foundation which makes contributing easier and more fun. Time to make patches, GNOME 3.2 is right ’round the corner!